This is going to be a short entry about our trip to Kasol in first week of May 2016. I still haven’t finished writing two more travelogues, so thought of finishing up the shorter ones first.
This time we had wifey’s cousin and her husband for company. Lets call them SS and AM. After the last trip with one other cousin (ACB from Spiti trip), I was somewhat wary of traveling with other people who have no idea about how we like to travel. It’s also because the Spiti trip “scared” ACB so much that he has sworn off almost all trips with us which involve walking for more than 1 hour in a day. Can’t say that I blame him. But Kasol was supposed to be a place to relax and just wander around and the plans were made with all four of us going there for 4-5 days.

But as with our every other trip, almost all the logistics were left to last minute and we had to do some last minute calls to get a hotel. Since the trip was supposed to be a relaxing one, a comparatively better hotel was essential. The place I booked actually turned out to be so bad that I created a Tripadvisor account just to write a long review against it. More on that maybe later.
Anyhow the trip began with a bus ride till Kullu from where we took a taxi from near airport. The taxi drivers there did their best to convince us to take all 4 of us in a small Alto car because it was the turn of that taxi at the taxi-stand. We insisted and got a bigger Maruti van though after a bit of stubbornness. The ride to Kasol from Kullu was uneventful but bumpy for most part. We found our hotel Deep Forest (don’t go there, ever.) and hoped to get some rest and hot breakfast before making plans for the day. The 2 room cottage that I had booked for Rs 6000 per day turned out to be an absolute disaster and I have written a fairly long review on this Tripadvisor link. Whoever reads this must boycott this place.

 

After a cold shower and some barely edible breakfast, rest of the folks stayed in for some sleep, while I picked up my camera and went on a walk around the town. Spending 20-25 minutes there made me realise  that I was not going to like that place much. Lots of college kids or young people from nearby cities on a break kind of crowd were everywhere. Then there were pilgrims to Manikaran Gurudwara passing through who make a mess in the town quite often. I finished walking around most of the town in about 30-35 minutes and ended up back near the hotel. A trail started from there going upstream alongside river. Since there was nothing better to do, I started walking in that direction. The wooded area nearby had some people resting and talking and further up there was a small campsite and a stone hut. I went past it along the trail alongside river following 2-3 water pipes. They went on further till the trail ended. I actually went further up till they path ended and had to retrace my steps back to the hut. Another rocky path from there went up the hill so I took that. After spending so much time in concrete filled hot cities, any place with trees, running water and nature was a relief. So I kept walking on the trail. There were some people working on a small clearing near the river, probably planting vegetables but I didn’t go there to ask.

The path was nice with thick tree cover all over and a lots of birds, insects and spider webs. After climbing downhill on other side, the path was relatively flat and much easier to walk on. I had seen no body else on the trail till now apart from the people mentioned earlier, so when I came across the first person coming from other direction I asked him about where the path led to. He said Graahan which I misheard as Graan which is Dogri for village. I asked him again name of the place and got the same answer and him looking at me with a confused expression. I thanked him and moved on and found two men carrying some heavy load on their backs walking in same direction as myself. It was them that I understood that village itself is called Graahan and was about 2-3 hours walk away. Adjusting according to pahadi time, it meant about 3 hours and 30 minutes more for me. So visiting the place was not possible considering I had company. If I was alone like my some other trips, then I could’ve gone there, but not that time. The time was just a few minutes before noon and I thought of walking a bit further before heading back. There was a small wooden bridge further up ahead over shallow stream. I rested there and had a drink of cold water. There were a few goats just across the bridge and a shepherd dog sleeping. I found the shepherd and asked him about the duration of walk village ahead. He answered the same, 2-3 hours walk. The man I had met 45 minutes before had said the same thing. So much for asking directions from pahadi people.

He then started asking me about how is AAP doing in Delhi ? I was taken aback and asked what he meant exactly. He answered that he is reading so much about the good work being done by AAP in newspapers and was curious about it. He looked quite surprised that the “articles” he was reading were ads not news and had a lightbulb moment. I had little desire to talk about that ass Kanjriwaal and his chandaal party and had a bit of small talk with him. For someone who spent most of his time in jungle, he seemed to be quite aware of things going around in the world, mostly by radio and newspapers, I think.

There was no cellphone coverage and it stayed that way till the stone hut. I arrived back to the hotel at around 1 pm. Rest of people were awake and we decided to look for a new hotel and have lunch. AM had short listed a few restaurants from Tripadvisor and surprisingly they turned out to be quite good. We first visited a place called Jim Morrison Cafe and had a long leisurely lunch. Me and wifey love these kind of places where you sit on ground and service is slow. I told them about the trail and village up ahead and they seemed excited about it. It was decided that we’d walk to Graahan early next morning and come back by evening. We then walked around the town looking for a new hotel and finalised one right next to the one where we were staying. Actually the hotel we actually ended up with was finalised next day, but that’s not that important. Anyhow, to make long story short, we planned to leave early morning and come back by evening after hiking till Graahan, a total of 16 km.

But as happens in all my vacations, we woke up late, spent too much time on checking out and breakfast and started our hike at noon. I didn’t want to spend another minute in Kasol, so I was just thankful that we could manage to leave at last. The walk was supposed to be pretty uneventful. Altitude is not that high, 8 km is not such a long distance, scenery is nice and the participants not that old. But it turned out that I had not made myself amply clear. I realised too late that SS and Am had little idea about what trouble they had gotten themselves in to. They had probably expected a long leisurely walk through a wooded area but it was a quite a bit of challenge for them as they had very little experience. But they kept on walking without complaining. It was only after walking for about 3 hours that we had a discussion about going further up or going back, SS said that we should walk on further as we had already walked for so long and we could spend the night in some guest house there. I was only too happy to accept. There was a small issue about our luggage in the hotel and we had told them that we’d be back at night, but we decided to do something about that later. So we started walking with Graahan in mind. Going back to Kasol same day was out of question.

 

We met quite a few people from village as well as some foreign tourists walking on the route which was mostly just a trail going upstream along the river. SS and AM were quite tired after walking for 4 hours and we had to stop frequently. We stopped at one point from where we could see some house in the village at top of a mountain before making the final approach. That turned out to be the most tiring section but we managed to finish it and reached outskirts. We were still outside the village when owner of a guesthouse invited us to his place to check it out. Looking at how rest of the group was doing, I decided to check that out first and found it to be fairly good. Rest of the people soon joined up and chose to stay there rather than walk further up to main village. So we dropped our stuff, took off our shoes and asked for something to eat and drink. AM was pretty tired and started napping.

After some time, me and wifey took off to explore the village on our own. Unlike other places, it was pretty old fashioned with most houses made of wood and stone , narrow streets and poor cleanliness. A local dog took upon the duty of following us around and kept on getting in fights with other dogs. There wasn’t much to see in village at the time as it was getting pretty dark, so we headed back once it started drizzling. On the way, I noticed something glowing like a firefly , but went I went closer, it turned out to be some kind of brown scaly worm with an illuminated bottom. I had never seen anything like this and was pretty excited. Tried to take a few pictures but didn’t get any good ones due to rain and darkness. While coming back, we met uncle of the guesthouse’s owner who walked with us back to the guesthouse. We went to sleep soon after having dinner.

Next morning, AM decided to stay back and rest while me, wifey and SS walked up the trail leading to Sar Pass. We were told that there were a few waterfalls on the route. We found first one without much trouble and spent almost a hour there. Wifey and SS then wanted to go back but I dragged them along to the 2nd one. They reluctantly followed till the point we could hear the waterfall, but then sat down like stubborn mules refusing to go any further. I was told that I was free to do whatever I want while they sit down and chat which was fine by me. The next waterfall was even more impressive albeit a bit more difficult to reach. I went on further but getting to base or top of waterfall was almost impossible due to flow of water. The trail went on further ahead and looked quite challenging but we were not going any further. I reached back to the two women and we started walking back to the guest house. Before leaving in morning, we were trying to call our hotel but all of their phone numbers were wrong or not working. There was no cell phone coverage. So we had to use a WLL (wireless in local loop) phone from the guesthouse which had to be taken to a specific point uphill where it could catch some signals. But nothing worked. After lunch and some rest, all 4 of us walked to the village, found a cafe and had some tea and snacks. Initially, we had planned to stay in Graahan only for a few hours, but ended up liking it so much that we spent 2 nights there.

Next morning we started our walk back to Kasol same way we had come up. The walk was pretty uneventful apart from a large group of hikers (45-50 people) starting their journey towards the Sar Pass. Once at hotel, we found our luggage as it is and hotel owner pretty chill about it. There isn’t anything interesting to write about after this as it’s all the general touristy stuff of going to a bunch of restaurants and places. SS and AM visited Manikaran Gurudwara next day while me and wifey had a long lazy breakfast  before heading back to Delhi.

Just to end this post, few points about Kasol. These are not particularly nice about the place or the people who visit there:

1) Majority of local Indian tourists as well as pilgrims passing through are assholes of first order. They’ll litter, smoke, drink anywhere they want and never clean up after themselves. “Pilgrims” coming back from Manikaran gurdwara can be seen getting drunk on their way back in Kasol.
2) Most of people visit Kasol just to smoke pot and drugs are easily available. I don’t condemn or condone it in anyway, but almost every other person you make an eye contact for more than 1 second will try to sell you some drugs.
3) Local shopkeepers do their best to fleece tourists and everything is sold 10-40% above MRP. Supposedly because Kasol is a remote place even with a metaled road. Funnily, Graahan which doesn’t have any road, had the same prices.
4) Kasol was a destination for foreigners and laidback tourists who like to enjoy the nature in peace , but now most of them have moved to other places because of harassment by local tourists. The sexually frustrated Punjab Haryana (and perhaps others too) crowd do their best to make everyone else as miserable as possible in every way possible. A local business owner told us a story about how a bunch of Punjabis were harassing some Israeli women and then ran away after a beating.
5) Kasol these days is a lot like a smaller version of New Manali. Crowded, ugly, unplanned construction, no care about natural beauty of place and full of annoying, obnoxious people. Few days back people were outraging about a cafe not allowing local Indians to enter their premises. Now I know that the cafe management was absolutely justified.